Teaching History

I've been struggling lately with planning my portion of our lesson on the assembly line to teach the 6th graders. I have to teach the history of the assembly line. I'm finding two main struggles with this section:

1) History is really hard to summarize in an interesting way so that you can teach it in only 5 minutes.

2) By nature of the subject, it is a lot less hands-on and more difficult to use various types of pedagogy to teach it. I find myself just resorting to the standard powerpoint show and tell method. Luckily I thought of semantically encoding some of the information to make it easier to remember.

Finally after getting frustrated as I was trying to magically make the history more interesting I realized that I was trying too hard. I find the information I was sharing to be inherently interesting. I think I was trying too hard to make it interesting when it ALREADY is. It made me realize that sometimes a teacher just has to appeal to the natural curiosity within the student.